Jessica's Body of Work

If you’re going to sit in Jessica Alba’s kitchen and eat her waffles; if you’re going to head downstairs to the rec room to check out her single-malt-scotch collection (impressive for a 26-year-old) or the tasteful Kama Sutra wood carving that her parents don’t approve of; if you’re going to follow her into the spare bedroom and, at her urging, jump on the TurboSonic vibration-training apparatus that she won at an awards show (“How weird is that?“ she asks, cracking up as she flips a switch so you shake like a jackhammer operator); if you’re going to do all this and still hope to get a straight answer to your one tough question—you still with What’s-his-name, the director’s-assistant guy?—then at some point, you’ll have to look at this bikini problem through her eyes.

Because men are sneaky, and bikinis, it seems, are the instrument of their sneakiness.

When Alba signed on to the 2005 movie Into the Blue, for example, she was all set to play a marine-biology student—the sort of woman smart enough to wear a wet suit when scuba diving. “But then the people in charge decided to dumb it down,“ she says, as we sit side by side on barstools at her kitchen counter, adding fresh berries and maple syrup to our waffles. “And all of a sudden, the wet suits went away.“ Before Alba even showed up, the quick-thinking boys in production shot a slew of underwater scenes with her double dressed only in a bikini. “I had to match what they’d already shot,“ she says. “If I’d bitched about the change, I would’ve been called a diva. I can’t say it was the first time that ever happened. And I can’t say it’ll be the last.“

Alba spent a hefty part of her adolescence around water, bathing suits, and the roving eyes of professionals—from ages 12 to 15, she worked as a series regular on The New Adventures of Flipper—so none of this comes as a surprise. As we talk, she keeps tugging the long sleeves of her knit shirt down over her hands, a gesture I can’t help but notice because it has a dual effect: It makes her appear more vulnerable and sincere, but it also transforms her workout top into something much sexier, a sort of Oscar-party off-the-shoulder look. She gets up to go to the espresso machine, still talking about men and their relentless eyeballing. “When you see the camera right here,“ she says, looking down at her black yoga bell-bottoms and moving her arms into a flagman’s V, “you’re like, Uh, that’s my crotch… I’m going to stand over here.’ You know? Cameramen are just horny sometimes.“

Isn’t that why they’re cameramen?

She gives the notion a more indulgent spin—“so they can capture beauty, and they can capture…“—and then she takes a long pause, during which she smiles and refrains from enumerating precisely what it is about her that guys with cameras are always trying to capture. It all seems to amuse her, but her strongest reaction to being the subject of so much attention (if attention is the right word for all those screen grabs and beach-vacation telephoto shots on the Internet) is to plunge into work. She has six movies coming out, a festival’s worth of Albacinephilia that includes this summer’s Fantastic Four sequel and Good Luck Chuck, a sex farce with extended servings of ’70s-style jiggle and raunch (alas, none of it Alba’s). It’s a surge of productivity that could help movie ecs, as she wryly puts it, in “getting past my hotness.“ Because ridiculous as it sounds, her hotness has apparently closed a few doors. “Right now,“ she says, “I’m just exploring what my contribution to this business is—other than wearing a bikini and getting caught by the paparazzi.“

Alba’s waffles are excellent, by the way—she makes them from scratch, talking easily, the way someone who knows her way around a kitchen does. She laughs so much it catches me a bit off guard. Before coming to brunch, I’d seen nearly everything she has done—“Oh, I’m so sorry,“ she says with a smile—and for whatever reason, she has rarely had to laugh in her early roles. Except for a few bikini scenes, it’s been pretty much the same broody persona ever since her breakthrough performance as Max Guevara, an ass-kicking avenger with a trace of feline DNA, on Fox’s 2000 cult hit Dark Angel. For a while, the then 19-year-old Alba was everywhere, staring out of billboards with a predatory expressionlessness, her lips—an overendowment that was hers alone, in the way that Salma Hayek or Jennifer Lopez might lay claim to other reaches of the anatomy—turned down in a natural pout.

In person, the pout is nonexistent. So is the aloofness. Alba keeps the TV in her kitchen set to a news channel on mute, and within seconds of my arrival a segment on the day’s bombings in Baghdad prompts a fierce broadside about “kids that are dying in Iraq“ and the sitting president’s policies that are like a “fuck-you to people with families.“ Alba knows what she’s talking about: She comes from working-class military people and grew up on air-force bases in Mississippi and Texas before settling in California. Her parents were young when they had her, she tells me, and her father joined the military to make ends meet. When they met, her dad, a second-generation Mexican-American, looked like Erik Estrada, and her mom resembled Farrah Fawcett. This goes a long way in explaining Alba’s look: part Mexican, part Scandinavian, and all ’70s heartthrob.

Although she has worked steadily since she was 12, eventually living in Florida, Australia, Vancouver, Borneo, and so on, she stays close to her parents, who now live just a few minutes away. She brings them with her to awards shows, where, inevitably, the clan is seated with all the Latin people. “So there we were,“ she says. “Marc Anthony was there, and George Lopez starts speaking to my father in Spanish, and my dad says, I don’t speak Mexican.’ I turned purple. Like, Dad, how can you even make that comment?’ “ She softens immediately. “I love my papa. But he has no filter. I probably acquired that characteristic from him.“

The long-form version of Alba’s heritage is something like Mexican-Spanish-Danish-French-Canadian-American. She just calls it “mid,“ and it has allowed her to fulfill a sort of one-woman color-blind casting policy. She has played a Greek, a Czech, a Brit-Malaysian, a Puerto Rican. She’s believable playing “genetically enhanced“ or “gifted with superpowers as the result of an encounter with a cosmic storm,“ but she still worries that ecutives and casting agents will pigeonhole her talents. So she’s taken a lot of ill-advised work—like Honey, playing a Bronx choreographer with a heart of gold, and Paranoid, playing a model—as a sort of antidote to whatever big blockbuster gigs she had going.

Alba’s work ethic is one reason you don’t read much about her in the gossip pages. The most lived-in items I see in her house are the three beat-up suitcases piled in a corner of her otherwise spotless garage, and all this travel seems to be expanding her range. In Good Luck Chuck, she does charmingly klutzy for the first time, pulling off the film’s scripted slapstick routines with action-star flair. The best bit of business, though, is something she made up herself: running back to Chuck’s convertible, she vaults exuberantly into the passenger seat, bonks her head on the gearshift, and immediately resurfaces with a big goofy smile. “Everybody was like, You did that on purpose?’ “ she says. “And I was like, Did it work?’ “

Alba’s starting to get serious parts, too. She says that she’ll be reprising her role as the pure-hearted stripper Nancy Callahan for Sin City 2 and that Frank Miller is writing new material to expand her character. Two of her upcoming movies she took over from other actresses: Long before production began on The Eye, a Tom Cruise-produced remake of a Hong Kong supernatural lm, Renée Zellweger left the role that Alba later signed on to play. And last summer, after Lindsay Lohan walked away from the film Bill, Alba took over her part. “I wanted to work with Aaron Eckhart,“ she tells me.

In many ways, this makes sense: Alba might just be the anti-Lohan. She’s utterly reliable, free of psychodrama, an unlikely candidate for rehab. Whatever she’s wearing, you can be certain it will not malfunction. When we talk, she insists on showing off just how normal, dorky, and tidy her daily life is—the pink KitchenAid mir, the silver-framed photos of boyfriend Cash Warren. All this personal discretion gives her a throwback quality on-screen, and it’s an essential part of her mystique and her movie-star persona. “The movie business gives a lot of people power—not always the right people,“ she says. “But you can tell who to trust. You can tell when people have the right thing in mind and when they’re just pricks for prick’s sake. And in all honesty, for the sake of art or a great movie, you still have to hold on to your dignity and who you are. If you lose that to be in a great movie? That’s your journey, not mine. Life’s too fucking short.“

We’ll know exactly what this life-is-short philosophy looks like in theaters by the end of the summer. For now, I can tell you what it looks like on the road: scary. After breakfast, we set out in Alba’s week-old Prius to take her dogs—a bulldog, Bowie, and a pug, Sid—for a walk, and she handles the deserted canyon roads in a decidedly un-Prius-like manner. “A while back, I was looking for a sports car,“ she says, “and I went to all the dealerships and asked for the most souped-up cars in my price range. I took them out to Mulholland and spun them all out.“ She finally settled on a BMW M3, because it hugged the road when she cranked the wheel and put her foot on the gas. That was two cars ago, but she’s driving now as if performing a sense-memory ercise.

When she stops the car, we’re parked at the bottom of a mountain. Bowie and Alba take off up a trail, and I follow with Sid, who drags me through the chaparral. After a short climb, Alba lets Sid off the leash—for Sid’s sake or mine, I’m not sure—and we continue ducking through the brush, scrambling after the dogs. “Oh, Sid!“ she says, when we come upon the pug taking a dump right in the middle of the trail.

Alba is still playing the gracious hostess, gesturing at the brambles and sandy switchbacks above us apologetically: “I didn’t know we were doing this, by the way.“ A few hundred vertical feet later, we reach the top, and I say the only sane thing there is to say about the view: “Omigod.“

“Crazy, right?“ she says, “Isn’t that nuts?“

From the summit, you can look across the canyon to Beverly Park, a gated community just off Mulholland. From a mile or so away, the place looks ridiculous, crowded and grandiose at once, as if all the French nobility decided to build their castles on the same mountaintop. When I ask whether she could see herself in something like that, Alba demurs, but she doesn’t criticize it, either—she has worked for and socialized with some of the Hollywood titans who live there. “I suppose it could be ideal, if you make a buttload of money,“ she says, trailing off. She considers her own neighborhood and its hilltop views of Los Angeles as “really superdorky,“ and she happily distinguishes it from more fashionable hilltops nearby, “where all the other little star people live.“

We sit on the sandy top, and Alba takes advantage of the view to try out some big thoughts. She dismisses her professional restlessness as a thing of the past and pronounces herself happy with who she is right now. “I don’t expect other people to do the work for me,“ she says. “I want variety, and I’ve done that. And I guess my arms are open to whatever’s next.“ It’s just a dog walk on a sunny Friday, a moment to relax at the start of her first week off after months on sets, but here she is, hammering out a personal credo and making a quiet point: What could possibly be wrong with being both hot and serious? You get the impression that whatever Alba does—whether it’s a superhero franchise or playing along with a photo shoot—she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Alba claims to be clumsy, so I lead the way down the mountain. “I fell so many times on The Eye, the crew there would get embarrassed for me,“ she says. “When I first met Alessandro“—Nivola, her costar on the movie—“I fell down the stairs. And then on Fantastic Four, I would always twist my ankle and fall down completely. It’s just frustrating, always hurting yourself. For Dark Angel, Jim Cameron actually made me do gymnastics and dance training so I could be more coordinated.“

We reach the parking lot without incident. Back behind the wheel of the Prius, Alba turns onto the empty road, and as she accelerates, she tugs on her sleeves again, revealing her bare shoulders with that same Flashdance gesture I’d seen in the morning.

This time, I call her on it.

“Are your hands cold?“ I ask.

“It’s just a nervous habit,“ she says. “Thank you for making me aware of it.“ Her words are kind, but they nevertheless convey a slight edge—something like “Don’t you try that bikini thing on me, too, buddy.“

But then she laughs again, and as she slaloms wildly back down Mulholland, she talks about putting a hole in her sleeve for her thumb, so she can just keep it that way.

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